IBM LTFS Enterprise Edition V1.1

IBM LTFS Enterprise Edition Version 1.1 is designed to enable policy management of tape as a storage tier in a GPFS environment, helping encourage the use of tape as a tier in the storage environment.

LTFS EE can be used as an operational storage tier accessible by disk-based applications. Using it to replace disks with tape in tier 2 and tier 3 storage can improve data access over other storage solutions as it increases efficiency and streamlines management of files on tape.

LTFS EE can play a role in reducing the cost of storage for data that does not need the access performance of primary disk. By replacing tier 2 and tier 3 disk storage with tape, organizations can achieve operational efficiency and cost effectiveness compared to the cost of equivalent disk-based environments. It simplifies the use of tape by making it transparent to the user and manageable by the administrator under a single infrastructure.

LTFS EE supports IBM LTO Ultrium 6 and 5 tape drives, as well as IBM System Storage TS1140 tape drives installed in TS3500 tape library.

With this release, software maintenance renewals for LTFS EE can be automated through a services contract. Feature number 9000 must be included on the software maintenance registration Product ID (PID) to indicate the desire to participate in this auto renewal process. Auto renewal services are not available in all countries or for all initial software maintenance contract terms.

For the installation of first node, purchase one per-install license. For the installation of additional nodes for meeting the scale-out requirement, purchase one per-secondary-node license for each additional node in the same LTFS EE cluster.

LTFS EE software is generally supported with these OSs, but some functional enhancements are only supported with selected OSs:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.2 x86_64
SLES 11 SP1 x86_64

The software requires:

IBM GPFS
IBM System Storage TS3500 tape library

Supported drives and media types

LTFS EE supports mixed environments and any combination of these drive types can be used in an LTFS EE environment and the supported media respectively.

The following drives are supported by LTFS EE:

IBM LTO Ultrium Gen 6
IBM LTO Ultrium Gen 5
IBM System Storage TS1140 tape drive

Planned availability date
August 9, 2013